How Should Football Fans Really Feel About Draft Day?

Conflicted responses to the NFL-approved movie

We have learned to accept (or, if you prefer, ignore) that the sport we love is a terrible burden on those who participate in it. In the last few years, as more concussion-focused studies have come out informing us of the dangers of football, we've erected blinders. Not even the increased threat of death could disrupt our weekly routine of camping out in the living room with a big ol' plate of barbecue in our lap, screaming at the television as grown men hit each other.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The medical mess the NFL now finds itself in makes consuming its product and anything related to it a murky situation for viewers. The most recent example of this conflicted narrative pops up with the new movie Draft Day, out today, which follows Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) as he attempts to transform the team's cellar-dweller reputation by snagging the number-one pick in the draft.

More From Esquire

There's a lot to like about this film. Not only does it do a terrific job portraying the high-pressure, high-stakes task of running a team's front office, but its story is both uplifting and inspiring for those who subscribe to the magic of pro sports. However, just like the game it covers, when you look past the surface of Draft Day, it ends up running into a few morality issues.

Before shooting began, filmmakers were able to get permission to use the NFL brand — a rarity, considering how notoriously protective the league is of its image. When you take that into account, Draft Day ends up looking less like a garden-variety sports flick than a fully-fledged, unabashed commercial for the NFL. It features real NFL players, real NFL logos, a cameo from a real NFL commissioner (Roger Goodell), footage shot at the real NFL Draft, and a number of real NFL corporate sponsors. Even the script, written by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman, had to be pre-approved by the NFL (the league allegedly didn't change much, just a scene in which Costner's character is hanged in effigy by angry Browns fans).

Major product placement in films is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it a new phenomenon. Plenty of corporate brands lend their names to feature-length projects. When this practice results in an entertaining, compelling piece of cinema, it's a win-win for filmmakers and moviegoers. But for Draft Day, a movie that explicitly promotes the NFL — an organization that has a terrible track record of protecting its own employees to a fault — it makes it seem complicit in the league's already-successful campaign of whitewashing its dirty laundry.

Associating itself with Draft Day is just the NFL's latest attempt to not only extend its brand but to provide an alternative storyline to the one that says the league doesn't care about their players' health.

After I saw Draft Day, I kept thinking back to Oliver Stone's 1999 flick Any Given Sunday, a movie that was famously unable to secure NFL rights due to its graphic nature and outrageous storyline. The league had a pretty obvious reason for withholding its support: The movie was completely obscene, taking the quasi-clean-cut image of professional football and trading it in for a jacked-up, WWE-style look at the game, in which athletes chainsaw cars in half and eyeballs get gouged out on the field.

No one would call Any Given Sunday a 100-percent realistic take on pro football. But if you consider the way the NFL has handled the concussion issue over the last 15 years­­ — ignoring statistics, sweeping aside former players with serious health risks — Oliver Stone's approach seems a bit more responsible than Draft Day's. At least with Stone's film viewers get a look at the potential risks involved with playing.

Of course, questioning Draft Day in the first place raises another set of questions about our consumption of art in general, i.e., should we really be taking a film this seriously when it has a wholly made-up storyline? I would normally say no, particularly since Draft Day has less to do with on-field spectacle than front-office politics. But because this movie has been sanctioned and promoted by an organization some accuse of medical malpractice, it ends up transforming from a separate creative entity into an extension of the NFL's all-powerful PR machine.

Today, football continues down its hard-charging, gladiatorial path, with fans still attracted to the violence, the carnage, and the glory. But unlike Roman gladiator fights, the NFL shows no signs of stopping. This is our fault, of course. We're the ones who continue to watch games and play fantasy football and pay for merchandise. And the NFL is more than happy to indulge us, spreading its imprint as far as possible and collecting the dividends. Associating itself with Draft Day is just the latest attempt to not only extend its brand but to provide an alternative storyline to the one that says the NFL doesn't care about their players' health. Though the League has made gains in the last year, with greater attention paid to helmet-to-helmet hits, it still has a long way to go, and our continued unquestioned participation in all of it just makes progress harder.

At one point in Draft Day, Costner's Sonny Weaver Jr. ends up telling the Jacksonville Jaguars general manager that "every year, someone comes out of this looking like a donkey." Weaver is talking about the NFL Draft, but several years down the road, I wonder if we might be saying the same thing about ourselves. How many people have to get injured before we do something? How many have to die? As with a bone-jarring, open-field hit on a wide receiver, we likely won't see the worst coming until it's too late.